Email written Oct 16, 2005\r\n\r\nGreetings from Bay St. Louis,\r\n\r\nGetting here was largely uneventful other than a bit of overweight baggage. I knew that I was headed in the right direction when I started seeing blue tarps on roofs. The road from Jackson to Gulfport was vaguely familiar as I had driven it three weeks ago in the other direction at ninety miles an hour. Late to a meeting and all that. I knew I had arrived when I stopped for a burger and the sink in the mens room was hanging off the wall and much of the ceiling was missing. As one would expect, the damage increases as you get closer to the coast. I was surprised by how much debris is still piled around although there were people and machines beavering away everywhere. Lots of closed businesses – entire shopping centers empty even though there is no visible sign of damage. It’s easy to miss a collapsed roof from the street level.\r\n\r\nI found my way down to B.S.L. by about 4 PM. It’s not easy now that the U.S. 90 bridges are gone (and won’t be back for at least 3 years). You have to drive west of B.S.L. on IH-10 and then double back. I was in B.S.L. three weeks ago when they were still trying to account for the missing. The historic district is up on a bluff over the Gulf of Mexico. Much of the bluff is now gone, scoured away by the storm surge leaving manholes sticking seven or eight feet out of the remaining ground. B.S.L. was more or less ground zero but still survives as opposed to its low-lying neighbor Waveland of which it can truly be said, “There is no there there.” The streets have mostly been cleared away but in the residential areas near the water great hummocks of shattered wood are stacked up against anything that didn’t move.\r\n\r\nB.S.L. is a small place about 10 miles from the Louisiana border. It’s one of the oldest cities on the Gulf coast dating from about 1699. It has apparently become an artist haven with a number of galleries, etc. with the kind of funky feeling that would be turned into a theme park if it were more accessible. One gets the feeling that it is a distant cultural suburb of New Orleans (the three largest cities in Mississippi are Memphis, Mobile and New Orleans). Even in its present state it has more charm than most of the cities I\'ve been in on the Mississippi coast.\r\n\r\nThere is electricity here now and water although you can’t drink it. A supermarket has reopened about thirteen miles away in Diamondhead. There are several feeding sites around town run by churches. The one we’ve been eating at turns out about 6,000 meals a day. The food comes from the Red Cross and various charitable organizations and for disaster it food, it’s not bad even if there are bibles on all of the tables. Most of the people working there are from California. I’ve only been proselytized once by an old guy with a beard who was way too high on Jesus.\r\n\r\nThe current damage assessment team had been working together for several days before I got down here. An Irish engineer who lives in New York City, an architect from D.C. and two architects from Austin, Texas (one of whom works for an acquaintance from my Elissa days) and lead by a Historical Preservation professor from Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Yesterday we finished the last of 88 building inspections. We looked at every red-tagged building in the town’s historical district, taking photos of each and doing a structural assessment of the damage and its potential for repair excluding those that are clearly beyond hope. Houses down here on built on pier and beam foundations. Many if not most of them rely on gravity and are not in any way bolted down to their foundations. As a result one of the most common problems is simply having the house knocked off its foundations. I’ve seen the piers just tipped over and I’ve seen houses that got pushed (and/or floated) fifteen or more feet from their piers.\r\n If the house has any structural integrity it can often be moved back onto its foundation piers. As you can imagine, house movers are in high demand.\r\n\r\nSpeaking of demand, there are help wanted signs everywhere. Lots of people left and haven’t/can’t return. The problem is that there is no place for the needed workers to live. Lots of businesses can’t reopen for lack of help or are operating reduced hours. It’s a conundrum. It’s an issue that is close to my heart because I have to find a place to live myself. I’m presently sleeping on the floor of the Hancock County Historical Society office. The team has been using it as our office and it is in very good shape for the shape it’s in. One wall blew out during the storm but it had just been replaced when I was here several weeks ago by a Michigan Air National Guard unit. Amazingly, the society’s collections were all saved mostly intact. Thousands of photos and documents covering the county’s history back to the eighteenth century. It has a bathroom but no shower and it has a functioning kitchen and delightful little courtyard that is now surrounded by 6 ft. piles of debris and trash. It’s all right for the time being. It has an amazing infestation of fruit flies that I am attempting to eradicate and the refrigerator has a returning demon that I have challenged with hot water and Clorox. I don’t know that it has ever held food before – the interior looks brand new – but there is a distinctly rotten smell threatening to return.\r\n\r\nInternet access here is hard to find. Several of my team members were staying with a couple who live a few blocks from here and they are within range of an unsecured wireless network because one of my architects was able to go online there. No one can figure out who has the access point but if you receive this email you will know that I went to Scott and Annie’s house and hacked some unsuspecting person’s internet access. These things teach one to limit one’s desires. All I need is a clean dry place with a toilet and broad band access somewhere in the Biloxi/Gulfport area. Is that too much to ask? Probably. But tune again when we find out if our hero is carried off and held for ransom by a band of piratical fruit flies.\r\n\r\n73\r\n\r\nL.